Thu, Jan 21, 2010from Desdemona Despair: Most of UAE to be underwater with sea level riseFocusing on UAE only, three of the most threatening outcomes of climate change have been studied in the report -- rise in sea level, water resources and dry land ecosystems.
The results say that 85 per cent of UAE's population living on the coast and more than 90 per cent of the infrastructure also lying along the seashores, the country's economy and general well-being is at risk even from a one-metre rise in sea level.
Two plausible sea level rise scenarios for the years 2050 and 2100 were studied in the report. In the first case (year 2050), the sea levels may rise between one and three metres, depending on the speed of polar ice melting, while in the second, the predictions are between two and nine metres.
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Tue, Jan 19, 2010from New York Times: Therapists Report Increase in Green DisputesAs awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet.
In households across the country, green lines are being drawn between those who insist on wild salmon and those who buy farmed, those who calculate their carbon footprint and those who remain indifferent to greenhouse gases.
"As the focus on climate increases in the publicís mind, it can't help but be a part of peopleís planning about the future," said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who has a practice that focuses on environmental issues. "It touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want." ...

Tue, Jan 19, 2010from via ScienceDaily: Tipping Point? West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Become Unstable as World WarmsA new study examines how ice sheets, such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, could become unstable as the world warms. The team from Oxford University and Cambridge University developed a model to explore how changes in the 'grounding line' -- where an ice sheet floats free from its base of rock or sediment -- could lead to the disintegration of ice sheets and result in a significant rise in global sea level... At the moment the model -- that uniquely takes into account the three dimensional shape of ice sheets -- is still fairly simple, but the researchers hope to eventually include more detail on how ice sheets interact with their base slopes and show the behaviour of individual ice streams. ...

Once the ice sheets go, at least we'll have this fun model to play with!